Pluralsight Blogs

Mapping WF 3 activities to WF 4

matt-milner — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:45:00 GMT

First, this post is not about any automated tools for mapping your activities, so don’t get too excited. :) Instead, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the changes to the base activity library in the context of the activities available today in WF 3. If you are using WF today, there are some activities that have direct counterparts, while others are split into multiple activities and yet others disappear completely. Of course there are also some new activities that were not available in WF 3. In the tables below, I outline each of these different categories with some notes. Hopefully this mapping helps you see what is changing, what is new, and what goes away.

NOTE: this information is based on Beta 1 of WF 4 and some changes are possible, though nothing big is likely, between now and the RTM.

Activities with direct or indirect equivalents

WF3 Activity	WF4 Activity	Notes
Delay	Delay	The activity works the same, but the timers are handled differently in the framework.
Sequence	Sequence
Parallel	Parallel	Similar, but the internals of execution may differ slightly by RTM.
Replicator	ForEach<T>, ParallelForEach<T>, ForEach, ParallelForEach	These provide <optional> typed access to the instance data and truly declarative authoring experience. Each represents the different execution modes of the Replicator activity – so it has been split into four similar activities. I think most people will use the generic versions more than the others, but time will tell.
CallExternalMethod	InvokeMethod, InvokeMethod<T>	Provides .NET method invocation and optional return of a typed return value. This can be a call on an instance stored in a variable or a static method.
HandleExternalEvent	Receive, ReceiveAndSendReply	WCF messaging activities replace the Local communications model, even for host-> workflow communication.
Listen	Pick	The Pick activity is the primary WF4 activity that replaces the Listen and the State which were both containers for EventDriven activities.
EventDriven	PickBranch	This is an indirect mapping and you don’t use the PickBranch outside the pick, but it serves the same basic purpose of the EventDriven.
Compensate	Compensate	Though the mechanism are slightly different, the activity serves the same purpose – to execute the compensation handler for a compensable scope.
CompensatableSequence	CompensableActivity	The new activity includes a ConfirmationHandler which can execute when a confirmation is signaled using the Confirm activity.
FaultHandler(s)	TryCatch	The try catch logic is more explicit now and you use the TryCatch activity to model your fault handling instead of using fault handlers on the composite activities.
IfElse	If	In WF 4, this can only have two branches, the If and the Else. For more branches, use the switch activity.
InvokeWebService	Send, SendAndReceiveReply	All web service communication in WF4 uses WCF.
Throw	Throw
TransactionScope	TransactionScopeActivity
WebServiceInput (output and fault)	Receive, ReceiveAndSendReply	WCF is THE messaging system to use with WF.
While	While/DoWhile	WF4 introduces the DoWhile in addition to the While to ensure the first iteration executes.

WF3 Activities with no direct WF4 equivalent

WF3 Activity	Note
ConditionedActivityGroup	Based on limited use (my guess) this activity was not moved to WF4.
Code	There is no code-behind file for workflows so there is no place to write code in the workflow. Create custom activities or use expressions where appropriate.
EventHandlingScope	No real equivalent, probably b/c this is an activity that gets overlooked or people use the state machine instead.
InvokeWorkflow	In the Beta, there is no activity like this one. One option is to host child workflows as WCF services and use the Send or SendAndReceiveReply messaging activities to start the child workflows.
Policy	In order to use rules in WF4, create a WF3 activity with a Policy activity inside it. Create properties on the activity and use them in the policy definition. Then use the InteropActivity to invoke the WF3 activity and execute the policy. You can use the properties on the activity as input and outputs to the policy.
Suspend	In WF4 there is more focus on having a “suspend on error” style exception handling, so direct suspend is not currently supported in the form of an activity.
SynchronizationScope	Again, my assumption here, this was not used a lot by folks so didn’t get moved over.
Terminate	No direct option to terminate, but exception handling has changed so that when a workflow throws an exception, you can abort, terminate or cancel it.
CompensatableTransactionScope	In WF4, use a Compensable activity and put a TransactionScopeActivity in the body.
State, StateInitialization, StateFinalization	There is no State Machine workflow in WF 4.

WF4 activities with no direct WF3 equivalent

AddToCollection<T>	Helper activity to simplify declarative workflow development and manipulation of collection variables.
Assign	Assigns a value to a variable – useful for declarative workflows.
CancellationScope	Allows you to define a scope of work and the steps to take if that work is canceled. Replaces the cancelation handler in WF3.
ClearCollection<T>
Confirm	Schedules the Confirmation logic for a Compensable activity.
ExistsInCollection<T>
Persist	Explicit declaration of persistence from the workflow. Replaces the need for the PersistOnClose attribute on activities.
RemoveFromCollection<T>
Switch<T>	Provides multiple branches of execution each based on a specific result from evaluating an expression.
Interop	Executes a WF3 activity in the context of a WF4 workflow. All public properties on the activity become In/Out arguments. Custom designers are not supported.

WF, WCF, Dublin Pre-conference from Dev Days

matt-milner — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:44:26 GMT

I had a great time at Dev Days doing the pre-conference session on WF, WCF and Dublin. It’s always fun trying to present on beta technology, and there’s nothing like having the first demo crash Visual Studio to start the day. :) Thanks to all who attended, you can find the demos here.

Gimmie My XPath

dan-sullivan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:41:00 GMT

I've posted a screencast on using XPath to create XLinq queries.

http://www.pluralsight.com/main/screencasts/screencast.aspx?id=xlinqxpath

Dan

VS Live Las Vegas Session Materials

david-starr — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:43:41 GMT

I promised several people in my sessions I would post session materials, so here they are!

I should note that I am not comfortable posting my customized SFTS process template at this time. I need to discuss this with the folks at Conchango before taking that step.

Slides – Supporting Scrum with Team System
Slides – Agile Testing with Team System
Code – RecipeBox sample code

Please be forgiving of the code, it isn’t stellar. Just what I was working on before I went into session :)

To everyone who attended my sessions, let me say, “Thank you”. I appreciated your feedback and enthusiasm. It was an honor.

Dutch DevDays 2009

Aaron Skonnard — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:04:18 GMT

I had a great time speaking last week at DevDays 2009 in Den Haag (The Hague), along with Fritz, Keith, and Matt. It was my first time in The Netherlands and I absolutely loved it there. The first thing I noticed when leaving the train station was the massive number of bicycles. There are actually more bicycles in The Netherlands than people. Most folks own at least 2-3 and they use them.

In fact, check out this shot I took at the Amsterdam central train station (yes, those are all bikes on the multi-layer platform):

We spent most of the week in The Hague by the sea, but got to spend Friday evening and all day Saturday sight-seeing in Amsterdam.

Then one of our old Dutch friends, Henk de Koning, picked us up for a drive and he took us to a neat little fishing town called Volendam where we had an excellent seafood dinner right by the water.

Now I actually understand the difference between The Netherlands, Holland, and why they call themselves Dutch. ;-) The conference organizers were fantastic and the attendees were very engaging, bright, and interesting to talk to…always makes for a fun week.

For those who attended the conference, here are the demos from my various presentations last week:

Demos for Silverlight 2 Controls and ASP.NET MVC talks at DevDays 2009

fritz-onion — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:52:41 GMT

Thanks to all who came to my last two talks on Silverlight 2 controls and ASP.NET MVC. You can grab the slides and demos from here and here respectively.

You may also find my screencast on ASP.NET MVC useful here.

Slides and demos from my WF 3 –> WF 4 talk at Dev Days

matt-milner — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:44:24 GMT

Thanks to all who attended my talk on migrating from WF 3.x to WF 4 at Dev Days. I’ve posted my slides and demos which you can download for review. Thanks for a great show, and look for me to post some screencasts of several examples in the coming weeks.

Slides and demos from my custom activities in WF 4 talk at Dev Days

matt-milner — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:41:31 GMT

For those of you who attended my talk at Dev Days 2009, I’ve posted the slides and my demo code for the custom activities talk. I’ve included the activities, the designers and the designer rehosting code along with some sample workflows using the activities.

Also, look for some screencasts that I’ll be doing showing these activities; it will be like watching the demos all over again.

Demos for ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 talk at DevDays 2009 in The Hague

fritz-onion — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:39:38 GMT

Thanks to all who came to my talk today on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, you can download the slides and demos here.

You may also find my screencast and whitepaper on the topic useful too.

Designing protocols

jim-johnson — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:14:00 GMT

A few of us have been recently been working on a new set of protocols for the project I'm currently on. The protocols themselves are unimportant, except that they're pretty involved, and for various reasons we're trying to both build and explain them.

It's fun to be doing something like this again, and I've found myself pulling a couple of old tools out of the toolbox to help me with it. These have been repeatedly useful to me; I figured they might be for others.

I find it useful to take the design in three passes (normally quite informally). In the first pass:

Describe the protocol in the abstract. There's actually a lot of good structure in the protocol documentation that we've built. The ideas of an ADM and an abstract state machine are generally useful. By first working on the protocol at that level, I find that I can keep from being distracted by message layout questions. It also means that I have a natural place to explain why each message exists.
Ignore optimizations until you have correctness. I actively work to defer optimizations to a later pass, and just worry about correctness. My goal is to establish the invariants, and get the minimum mechanism in place to cover them. It makes it more likely I'll get correctness in the first place, and it gives me a baseline to measure the complexity overhead vs. benefit for any individual protocol optimization.
Drop messages for error handling. In some ways this is an extension of the previous point. I always worry about the error paths, especially for a distributed system. I've consistently found that if I initially say that the only error signaling action I can take is to abandon the processing of a message, and the only error detection mechanism I have is lack of expected message arrival, I'm ahead. This is because losing a message is the one error case that I will have to handle, regardless. By making this the only error case, I'm forcing myself to cleanly design for this absolutely required case.

In the second pass:

Begin adding in sunny day optimizations. I'll add them in one by one, verifying that the invariants continue to hold (or by specifically loosening them and verifying that they're still consistent with the actual use in the first pass). I can come up with some pretty baroque stuff, so I'll often abandon an optimization when faced with the actual complexity/benefit tradeoff.
Begin adding in error messages. Now that the sunny day and the one required error case is handled, I'll look to add in error messages for specific cases. Each time I'll ensure that it is purely informational, and can trivially be lost.

Finally, in the third pass:

Create the concrete protocol specification. Now that I have a completed ADM and an abstract state machine that I'm happy with, I can build the concrete protocol message formats and the specific retained state.

This advice may look reasonably obvious, and yes, I frequently do most of this informally. The one exception is that I do try to hold to the 'first only drop messages for error handling' rule.

CardSpace v2 moving into a new role?

keith-brown — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:41:07 GMT

In the first version of CardSpace (the one that shipped with Vista), the focus was on building an identity selector that put the user at the center of the transaction. With v2 on the horizon, it feels like the emphasis is changing. No longer do I hear talk about user centricity. Rather now the identity selector seems to be positioned as a user-friendly form of home realm discovery for federated identity scenarios. Indeed CardSpace Geneva doesn’t include support for personal cards at all (although the CardSpace blog indicates that this is coming). The new selector is smaller and quicker to use, and does not ask the user nearly as many questions.

Ruchi Bhargava, a dev lead on the Federated Identity team who currently leads the CardSpace team, has some enlightening comments in a recent screencast. I’ve done my best to transcribe here some interesting tidbits that I found a little more than halfway through the screencast:

“When we built CardSpace v1, our idea of CardSpace v1 was that we are going to have these users who are going to be very worried about security and very interested in identity. What we have realized is that, not really true, most users don't really care about identity, most users just want to get into an application. Really choosing an identity is just a step in getting to the application.

In v1 we had a whole drama around the identity selection experience we had the secure desktop, which would take over the screen which would result in sometimes the user losing context in what they were trying to do…

…the mantra is we are trying to fix three things. We are trying to make our product lighter. We are trying to make our product faster. We are trying to make our product smaller...

...we've realized that we don't really want to be different from existing ways of using credentials and using identities. We actually want to use the same metaphors so that users understand them and are seeing them multiple times. We've tried to use CredUI, and we've gotten rid of a lot of the steps that you had to take to choose an identity. The number of clicks that you have to do are much much fewer now. It's a much faster experience for the user.”

These changes will definitely make CardSpace more attractive to users, although it diverges from the original vision, which was all about getting the user involved in an “introduction ceremony” to help a user decide if she wants to trust a relying party with her personal information. Apparently Microsoft has discovered that users are put off by ceremony and would rather just “get on with using the application”. Regardless of how you feel about this shift, it’s helpful to know that it’s happening.

Are complex federation scenarios driving us away from user-centric identity?

keith-brown — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:00:36 GMT

As I pointed out in my last post, in corporate federation scenarios, we don’t need to put the user at the center of the transaction. In these scenarios it’s not her personal information being shared, but rather a corporate identity that’s attached to her because she works for a company, and part of her job includes sharing some of those claims with trusted partner organizations via federation.

But outside of the corporate space, in the sphere of social apps for example, things become less clearcut. For example, let’s say you wanted to build a social application in the cloud that relies on the .NET Access Control Service (ACS) to provide some basic role-based access control features. And let’s say you support some big identity providers like Windows Live ID (WLID), and maybe others that will more than likely come along in the future. Now you’ve got a reasonably complex federation scenario, where WLID (say) authenticates the user, provides claims about the user to ACS, which transforms those claims into something your app can use. How would you put the user in the center? Doesn’t the user need to authorize which claims WLID divulges to ACS? And then further, which claims ACS divulges to the app?

It’s interesting that today WLID doesn’t issue claims from the user’s WLID profile. It’d sure be nice to be able to get the user’s given name and surname, for example. The only claim WLID supports seems to be the user’s ID (the email address she uses to sign-in to WLID). I wonder how WLID will ever support more than that in a federation scenario like I describe here? How would WLID know to trust ACS with the user’s profile info, given that ACS may pass this info to any other app? How does the user know that ACS (or any other intermediate issuer) is trustworthy enough to handle her personal information? While the user probably trusts the application to some extent, it seems ludicrous to ask her if she trusts some intermediary like ACS.

Perhaps this is one of the tensions that helped push CardSpace v2 away from user centricity. But more on that in another post.

Code Cast 27 – Ade Miller

david-starr — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:28:20 GMT

Ade Miller is a Development Manager in Microsoft patterns & practices. He was good enough to stop by the ElegantCode Cast and chat with us about how p&p does Agile software development.

We covered a lot of ground, but the topic of how a high functioning, distributed Agile team gets its business done just never gets old, now does it?

Download the MP3

Show Links

Microsoft patterns & practices
Some videos of the p&p lab and team rooms
Scrum for Team System
Follow the Sun development
Whitepaper - Distributed Agile Development in Microsoft patterns&practices
Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
The Agile 2009 conference
Ade’s Scrum Bestiary Talk
EntLib 5.0 customer prioritized backlog.

Speaking at Microsoft Dev Days 09 in Hague, The Netherlands

matt-milner — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:41:58 GMT

I’ll be speaking at Dev Days 09 in a couple of weeks. I’m excited to be doing a pre-conference day on WF and WCF 4 as well as “Dublin”. then I’ve got two WF sessions during the conference, one on building custom activities with WF 4 and another on moving from WF 3.x to WF 4.

After the show, I’ll try to get some screencasts up of a few of my demos, and you can check out our Pluralsight On Demand! where I’ll soon be publishing some modules on “Dublin”.

Issues with Live Mesh on Windows 7 RC

matt-milner — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:06:52 GMT

I recently took the plunge and upgraded my 64 bit desktop from Vista to Windows 7 RC and for the most part I’ve been very happy with it. So far the only compatibility issues I’ve had were with some CD / DVD mounting tools and Live Mesh. I quickly realized how much I’ve come to rely on Live Mesh to keep files in synch between my desktop and laptop. All of my presentations and writing that I do live on both machines and I have a Tools folder with small utilities like .NET Reflector, Notepad2, etc. So when Live Mesh kept crashing under Windows 7, I got a little miffed.

I started by trying to set the compatibility to Vista or Vista Service Pack 1, but that didn’t fix the problem. I kept getting errors that the Mesh Operating Environment had stopped working and after closing it, it would restart, only to fail again in a few minutes. So, I did what any self-respecting developer does when they have a problem they can’t fix: I searched the web. Nothing, no love at all. I saw a few things about recent updates, which I’d installed already, and some registry hacks for the Win 7 beta, which were already incorporated into later builds of the product. So finally, I did the only logical thing, I uninstalled Live mesh, logged into Mesh.com and got the installer, and re-installed. A quick reboot, and all seems well. So, for those of you out searching the internet for a fix, hopefully this helps you out.

Of course, this is on My Machine, which is a home built x64 machine with an upgrade from Vista SP 1 to Win 7 RC. With all that in the mix, your mileage will likely vary. ;)

BizTalk Server 2009 Virtual Labs are now available

matt-milner — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:18:00 GMT

Are you looking to try out BizTalk Server 2009 but don’t have the time to setup a full BizTalk environment? Then Microsoft’s Virtual labs might be right for you. The most popular labs for BizTalk Server have been updated for BizTalk Server 2009 and a few new ones focused on the features of BizTalk Server 2009. Check them out if you are interested.

In related news, I’m in the process of adding BizTalk Server 2009 content to the BizTalk Server Fundamentals course in Pluralsight On-Demand!. If you haven’t already subscribed, you should really check it out. I’m spending my free time these days learning about Agile Team Practices from David Starr and ASP.NET MVC from K. Scott Allen. It’s the next best thing to having these guys in a classroom with me. We’re continuing to expand the library too, so the subscription gets more valuable by the month – not many investments you can say that about today!

If you are in LA for TechEd - also a Star Trek movie review

jon-flanders — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:49:50 GMT

Movie was just awesome. Maybe one of the best movies of all time. Really ever.

If you are in LA for TechEd you have a moral obligation to go see Star Trek - at the Arclight Cinerama Dome Hollywood -http://tinyurl.com/ca3b3o. The Arclight is really the best theater I've ever been too. Leather *assigned* seats, no talkers (well almost never any talkers) great projection and sound in every theater.

If you are into music - go next door to Ameoba - its an old school record store (and there aren't many of those left).

Is the Identity Metasystem user centric or not?

keith-brown — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:04:25 GMT

My first introduction to this term involved reading Kim Cameron’s article, where he defined it. That article lists seven laws of identity, which make it clear that the user should be at the center whenever identity about her is revealed to a relying party. But over the last couple of years I’ve seen this term used in contexts that have nothing to do with putting the user at the center. Specifically I’m thinking of discussions of federated identity, typically used in a corporate setting, where WS-Federation is used to give members of an organization a single-sign on experience to their own resources and often resources in partner organizations (cross-org federation). In many of these cases, the user isn’t given any notice that her identity is being shared with a relying party. There’s usually no identity selector involved at all, and the user isn’t shown what attributes of her identity are being shared.

Now in a corporate environment, when the user’s attributes are not personal (e.g., her SSN or credit card number isn’t being shared, rather her employee ID, groups that she’s in, etc. are being shared instead), who cares about putting the user at the center? It’s not necessary and would probably just annoy the user by adding an additional step (the user granting permission for these attributes to be shared).

But why do people still use the term, “Identity Metasystem” in this context? Just because we’re sending SAML tokens around using WS-Trust and WS-Fed (passive) doesn’t mean we satisfy the seven laws.

Screencast: Windows Workflow – Creating custom context channels for workflow services

matt-milner — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:06:00 GMT

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to create a custom context channel in workflow services.

.NET 3.5 supports managing context in a SOAP header or HTTP cookie, but that may not be where your context information lives. In this screencast I show an example of a custom channel that enables the context information to be passed in a URL to enable operation invocation from a link in an email.

Check out our growing collection of free .NET screencasts and videos. Subscribe to the Pluralsight feed to be notified when new screencasts are published. Also, check out our growing library of online .NET training courses -- see what you can learn with Pluralsight On-Demand!

Screencast: Windows Workflow – Managing conversations in workflow services

matt-milner — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:04:00 GMT

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to manage conversations in workflow services.

Conversations are special cases of context management in workflow services requiring extra information to correctly route messages. In this screencast, I show you when you need to think about conversations and how to properly write your workflows and clients to deal with them.

new cloudApp() developer competition

matt-milner — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:56:25 GMT

Looking to show off your skills in building cloud applications using either .NET or PHP? Like to make a little $$ while you are at it. Well, if you bring your A game, you just might have a shot in the new developer competition that Microsoft is running. You can check out the details on the contest web site, and find links to all the tools you need to get started.

I’m looking forward to seeing some cool ideas come out of this and participating in the community judging.

From the website:

new CloudApp() is a US-based developer challenge for .NET & PHP developers creating cloud applications or services (hereafter "application") on the Azure™ Services Platform. Have your application judged by industry leaders Om Malik and Michael Cote and share your cloud coding skills with other developers. Grand Prize Winners will be announced on stage at Structure 09 and featured on azure.com.

Unfortunately, for those of you not in the US, you read that correctly, and this is only open to folks residing in the 50 states and DC. I’m sure it is for legal reasons, but that definitely limits the amount of cool submissions we’ll be seeing.

My article on client-side data binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 is now live

fritz-onion — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:23:52 GMT

I’ve written an article on the new client-side data binding mechanism coming in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, which is now live in the inaugural Pluralsight newsletter, which you can read here.

You can subscribe to future newsletters and be the first to read new articles by one of our instructors on our home page.

Interlude: The Day the Earth Stood Still

jim-johnson — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:16:00 GMT

I'll admit it. I made a huge mistake. It isn't like I wasn't warned. I read enough reviews that panned it. But, being the optimist, I went ahead and bought the 2 DVD set with both the new and the old version. After all it was only a few dollars more, and I love the old version. Then I sat down to watch, hoping that the new version wasn't as bad as claimed.

The good news is that it wasn't. The bad news is that it was worse.

It was so bad I immediately watched the old version just to get the new version out of my system.

Didn't work.

But watching the two movies back to back showed in stark contrast a very well done movie and a very poorly done copy.

I don't blame Keanu Reeves here. He wasn't bad, per se, as Klaatu. The emotionless "doesn't fit in his skin" persona is something that he does. And here he had a character that called for that.

I also don't blame the special effects. Again, per se. The ship was truly unworldly, and Gort was a nice BSG-ish update on the prior Gort.

No, I blame the writing, and whoever had any oversight on the script. That would have to include the director and the producers, but probably doesn't stop there. I don't quite blame the printers, but it's a close run thing. But let me be clear: the writing is what makes the old version great and the new version awful.

Where to start? The new script is self loathing, rather than hopeful. And that self loathing kills the plot. Klaatu is coming to Earth to destroy it (yes, I know, humanity. But I is one, and proud of it). So why arrive at all? Why set down? Why have _any_ dialogue whatsoever? From virtually the first scene the script makes no sense. There's no commitment to any internal consistency.

Compare this to the old version. Klaatu is coming to deliver a warning. Now _that's_ a reason to arrive and to attempt to engage in dialogue.

In both, Klaatu is shot almost immediately. In the both, he restrains Gort. Again, the old version makes sense -- hold off on the trigger, if the purpose is to engage. In the new one, and after allowing for the script already being seriously stupid by this point, this event should have been enough to immediately destroy humanity. Yet still we wait. Why? To be blunt, there is no reason ever given why the final credits should not be rolling at this point.

There's an eventual throwaway about a sleeper agent. But by then we've already seen that Klaatu can, from orbit, pull plants and animals from the surface. Why don't they use that to pick up the agent? I know that I repeat myself, but it's just an incredibly poorly plot.

But a silly, incoherent plot that violates its own internal logic in the very first scene is not the only or even the most conspicuous failing of the script. It is the loss of inference and wonder.

Go back and watch the old version. You'll see very little on screen action. But you'll see a very tight plot. A lot of the 'action' takes place off screen and is mentioned in passing, or it is shown in second long shots, or, best of all, it is just left to the audience to infer.

Let me take two examples. First, Klaatu's escape from the hospital. In the new movie we get to see Klaatu overpower and disable the security apparatus and the guards. We are shown it in some detail, the special effects team got work to do, and the movie spends time on it. Very flashy. Very visual.

But in the old version, you hear him say that he should leave, and he's told that he can't. The next shots are of them finding that he is gone and seeing him walking down a street, apparently a free man. By seeing how Klaatu leaves, the script makes him a more limited character. You now have an idea of what he can do. In the old version, you have no idea, and that is the point that the sequence hammers home to you.

Then there's Gort. The new Gort looked a lot better, which is why I don't blame the special effects folks. But they couldn't just leave Gort to be Gort. He had to do something. Ugh. In the old version, there are mentions that they've 'tried everything' to either break into the ship or Gort. And Gort has just stood there. In the new version, we get to watch Gort take out a set of missiles and drive a couple of predators into tanks.

Gort in the old version, AFAIR, never attacked to defend itself. It did for Klaatu. The very strong message was that humanity was simply beneath its notice. The new Gort, by taking out the missiles, reduced itself. Significantly. From a godlike destroyer of worlds to a self arming anti-missile system.

And I won't even go into the main event: the nanite attack vs. the selective disabling of electricity worldwide. That one is just too easy.

In the end, the scriptwriter in the old version understood Clarke's Law, and trusted that the audience implicitly understood it as well. The one for the new version either didn't (probable) or didn't believe the audience could (also highly probable).

Jim.

Recent Pluralsight On-Demand! library updates

Aaron Skonnard — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:54:40 GMT

Over the past several weeks, we’ve published several significant updates to the Pluralsight On-Demand! library. I figured a blog post summarizing these updates would be helpful to our subscribers. So here it goes…

We updated the ASP.NET MVC Fundamentals course by Scott Allen with two new modules, including ASP.NET MVC Models and a detailed look at using Ajax with ASP.NET MVC.
We published the new Agile Team Practice Fundamentals course by David Starr – the first three modules include Agile and Why It works, Agile Requirements and Estimation, and Scrum.
We published four modules in the new SQL Server Fundamentals course by Dan Sullivan, including T-SQL and the CLR, T-SQL and the CLR II, CTE’s and Ranking, and Hierarchies.

We’ve also added a lot of free training content in the past few weeks:

We added a free .NET/C# Tutorial by Keith Brown to the online library – it contains nearly 4 hrs of introductory training. Just register on our site to gain access.
We’ve added another dozen screencasts or so to our free screencast library on topics ranging from the new WCF REST Starter Kit, WF, and client-side data binding in ASP.NET Ajax 4.0.

While this is great content, I’m even more excited by what’s in the plan for the next several months…stay tuned! Please let us know if there are specific things you’d like to see...

Screencast: Windows Workflow – Managing workflow services context in WF client applications

matt-milner — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:19:00 GMT

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to manage context information when using workflows, and the Send activity, to interact with workflow services.

When using workflows as clients to workflow services, the Send activity is used to manage context on the client. This screencast covers how to configure the send activity correctly with respect to context and how to manage the context manually.